Social Question

What is your favorite restaurant salad?

When you go to a restaurant and order a salad, what’s your favorite one to order? A plain ‘ole tossed salad with blue cheese dressing? Caesar? Greek? Chef? Some funky salad like Mellow Mushroom’s Enlightened Spinach Salad with dried cherries, apples, pecans, and feta? Olive Garden’s signature salad?

Personally, I think it’s a waste to order salad at a restaurant filled with yummy food, but I was invited to lunch with a co-worker and will be ordering a salad in order to stay within my caloric budget for the day. That’s what inspired this question.

I thought you were asking favorite restaurant for a moment and got all excited.
I like a lettuce wedge. I don’t buy nutritionally void iceberg lettuce, so I order it as a vehicle to shovel blue cheese and bacon into my mouth occasionally.
I like a well made side salad. If I know a restaurant has a good one (meaning more than 3 ingredients), then I’ll order it. Again, blue cheese dressing because I don’t have it at home.

I like mozzarella and tomato and roasted peppers. I think it’s called “Caprese.”

You know what kills me about salads in restaurants? They charge over $10 for a big one, about $6 for a little one, and they’re 90% lettuce, with a few slices of cucumber and tomato, or some other stuff, but lettuce is a few bucks a head, tops. SO you’re paying $10 for mostly lettuce.

Ah, yes. There’s one restaurant in town, @jca, that has an heirloom tomato salad when it’s in season. Rounds of tomato and fresh motz, drizzled in balsamic redux and a basil sauce. I like that one a lot.

I love Greek salad, and there’s another version available that is nothing but diced tomatoes, green pepper and onions with Greek dressing. Delicious!

Olive Garden’s salad is great – plenty of sliced purple onions and black olives plus pre-dressed. What’s not to love?

Caesar is great – extra anchovies for me!

Extra blue cheese on a side salad (there is a deli here that makes me blue cheese and onion sandwiches with just enough ranch dressing to hold them together. Panera will substitute blue on the grilled cheese sandwich. YUM!)

You don’t want to know what I suggest they do with that ridiculous wedge of iceburg! Lazy bastages!

So I went to that lunch with my co-worker and decided to get a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp. It was absolutely amazing. The shrimp was so flavorful that I didn’t get that “crunchy water” sensation from the lettuce, the croutons were fantastic, the shaved parm was perfect, and the dressing was so good! This might be my go-to salad when I find myself going out when I’m eating healthy. Now I’m wondering if that was just a great Caesar salad or if they’re all that good – I’ll just have to find out by ordering salads more often.

On the other hand, this place (Mellow Mushroom) smelled of delicious pizza, garlic bread, and calzones that I would’ve love to eaten instead. I’ll have to try it out on a weekend when I’m more lax on calories. If the salads are good, the unhealthy stuff has to be good too!

Caesar salads aren’t healthy, sorry. In fact, most restaurant salads probably need a closer look if you are going for healthy. It isn’t uncommon that the salads are worse for you than the rest of the menu!
I’m thankful that California law forces menus to include nutritional info. It helps with those tricky misnomers.

@GloPro I used the website’s nutritional information. It was 370 calories, including dressing and shrimp, and the fat, carbs, etc. all fit into my daily goals. Is there a chance the nutritional information is false? Sure, but for today’s purposes, it doesn’t really matter.

Oh, a healthy Caesar salad is so rare! Smart using the website. Lucky find.
You see how healthy I am, ordering iceberg smothered in bacon, blue cheese, and candied walnuts. When I eat a salad out I just assume it’s shitty for me. I eat well at home, though, always.

Pretty much all salad is good. Yum! I don’t like that so many salads include meat. (I’m allergic to chicken.) Ordering a salad without the meat can be a hassle. Also, they usually won’t give you a price reduction for ordering the salad without meat. IMO, salads should always be available without meat for one price. Adding chicken, beef, or shrimp should be an additional charge.

I always have trouble with this at McDonalds. They just can’t believe someone doesn’t want grilled or crispy chicken in their salad. A couple times they’ve screwed up and given me chicken. Once, the girl suggested that I just pick it off.

@GloPro I’m a strong believer that you should never cut anything out of your diet. No food is “bad” if it’s eaten in moderation or if it fits into your daily goals. I log my food meticulously, some might say obsessively. I am lax on weekends, like I said, but I do average my intake over the course of the week so I know how many calories I have to “spare” on weekends. I eat all the foods I like, but I eat healthy more often than not and I still lose weight. It’s all about finding that balance, especially when one loves food as much as I do.

I have a nagging suspicion that nutritional information on that salad was off, though. It was too good to be 370 calories. Oh well!